1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method and a circuit arrangement for automatic character recognition on documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Given the copious use of documents for organisational purposes in ever more areas of life, automatic recognition of characters is becoming more and more important as it offers considerable advantages with respect to time and cost outlay in comparison with manual preparation of documents in a form suitable for data processing. The useful information on a document to be read comprises manually-written or typed characters, the recognition of which is performed in a plurality of partial processes. Examples of primary partial processes of the overall recognition process are the location of a character, its preparation and analysis, as well as the assignment to a character class (classification).
The time required by a character reading system for processing a document cannot be predicted in the individual case due to the widely differing designs of forms and the complex recognition processes, which are not restricted to a standard script and precisely defined reading zones, and may vary within wide limits. As a result of coupling the character reading system to input units with a high throughput rate, for example high-speed document sorters, bottlenecks can arise during the processing of the incoming documents which could result in the document being rejected even before the recognition process commences.